Here in the nation's capital, the question of the moment is whether the rise of the Islamic State extremist group has changed President
Barack Obama's
reluctance to re-engage in Iraq militarily, or to really intervene for the first time in Syria—and that certainly is an important question.

But equally important and far less discussed is this: Has the specter of a new, different and frightening kind of Islamic extremism changed the American public's deep reluctance to engage anew in the Middle East?

Privately, some administration officials think it probably will. But it is hard to tell that yet from either public polling data, which is sparse in August, or the sketchy discourse in the midterm elections, which tends to reflect the national conversation as much as shape it.

What seems more clear is this: The first task facing Mr. Obama as summer draws to a close is deciding what strategy he is going to pursue for dealing with the Islamic State threat, and how much direct military intervention will be part of that. But if he is going to escalate direct American involvement, his second task is going to be to convince and persuade his country's reluctant and skeptical citizenry that the U.S. has to be engaged.

One Pew Research Center poll taken this month indicated a slight majority of Americans approved of air strikes against militants in Iraq, but found views starkly divided along partisan lines. What's most remarkable about American public opinion in this summer of globe-girdling international crises, however, has been the extent to which many Americans of all stripes, clearly weary of war and its costs, seem to have simply tuned out those crises.

When Americans were asked in the most recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll early this month whether they were satisfied with the level of U.S. involvement in dealing with the threat from the Islamic State, or instead thought America should be more or less involved, 30% thought America should be more involved, a sentiment that was far more prevalent among Republicans than Democrats.

But the most striking finding in the survey was that the largest share of Americans—a full 40%—said they didn't know enough to have a view.

The findings were similar on the long and destructive civil war in Syria—a conflict in which the American president came within an eyelash of ordering airstrikes exactly one year ago. Some 18% said they were satisfied with the level of American involvement, 16% said the U.S. was too involved, and 21% said the country isn't involved enough. But again, the largest share of Americans, 42%, didn't know enough to have a view. "Large parts of the country are opting out," concludes Republican pollster
William McInturff,
who conducts the Journal/NBC News survey with Democrat
Fred Yang.

That may not come as a particular surprise given the nation's demonstrable war weariness 13 years after the 9/11 terror attacks ushered in long, debilitating and ultimately unsatisfying wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Public polling has found that a majority of Americans don't think the two were worth the cost. And the nation is led by a president whose presidency is, to a significant measure, built around his pledge to bring those fights to an end. Indeed, the biggest disconnect in America today may be the one between national-security elites, who see direct intervention against the Islamic State as not only desirable but inevitable, and the public, which simply isn't yet signed up for that ride.

Certainly the desire to look away from the new set of storm clouds in the Islamic world is reflected in the campaign. As the Journal's
Janet Hook
has reported, a new analysis by Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group finds that, in ads for the eight most competitive Senate races this year, international affairs are going almost unnoticed.

"In the bifurcated universe of what shows up in campaign ads (versus) what shows up in the news, there's this incredible disconnect," said
Elizabeth Wilner,
senior vice president of Kantar Media/CMAG.

Presidents, of course, don't have to simply accept or react to American public opinion. One of the powers of the presidency—and perhaps one of its great responsibilities—is to shape public opinion.

If the president makes a fundamental shift toward a more aggressive—yes, more interventionist—stance in dealing with the Islamic State, the decisions on how to go about doing that certainly will be tough. Bringing Americans along will be tougher.

In their 238 years as a nation, Americans have swung periodically between deep engagement in the world and conscious disengagement, a luxury afforded to a large country bounded by oceans and safe borders. But which is the American normal? The period of interventionism that marked the Cold War and its extension by the 9/11 terror attacks? Or the period of minding-our-own business that preceded that era? We may be in the process of finding out.